Following the money trail

By CARL HARTMAN

“So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government” (Alfred A. Knopf, 401 pages, $27.95), by Robert G. Kaiser.

When a cowboy crops a calf’s ear to show it belongs to his ranch and not to anyone else, that kind of earmark doesn’t hurt anybody much except the calf — and maybe the calf’s Mom.

A Washington earmark is something else. When a Congressman and a lobbyist join to insert a special spending item into a money bill, for the benefit of the lobbyist’s client, that’s a Washington earmark. It causes lots of pain, not only to the president’s Office of Management and Budget, which resents competition for even a small cash cow, but to reformers all over the country.

Barack Obama promised in his presidential campaign that his administration “is not about serving your former employer, your future employer, or your bank account.”

That kind of service, which includes the production of earmarks, is among the most remunerative in Washington. It can take you from a government job to a much better-paying private lobbying job by way of the famous revolving door. It has also fired the indignation of Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor and senior correspondent at the Washington Post.

Kaiser has written in three books what was wrong with the government of the Soviet Union. He sums up what he finds wrong in Washington with the subtitle of his new one: “The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of the American Government.”

He took his main title — “So Damn Much Money” — from Robert S. Strauss, no slouch at lobbying. The book says the Strauss law firm did $31.4 million worth of lobbying in 2007. Strauss must know something about American government. He served both as chairman of the Democratic National Committee under President Jimmy Carter and as ambassador to Russia for Republican President George H.W. Bush.

Kaiser gives Strauss the last word in the book: “It’s a company town, and the business is lobbying.”

The size of the private business is impressive even in a city where government is the main industry and the talk has turned to trillions as well as billions. Tens of thousands of lobbyists spent nearly $3 billion of their clients’ money trying to influence government in 2007, according to official filings. Kaiser thinks that’s only a fraction of the actual amount.